Saving Carnegie Hall

By

Joanne Kaufman

April 17, 2013 4:10 p.m. ET

New York

Sometimes when he wants a little break Gino Francesconi leaves his office at Seventh Avenue and 57th Street and strolls outside to watch the tourists. "I'll see two people walking together and one will notify the other 'that's Carnegie Hall,'" said Mr. Francesconi, his face lighting with pleasure.

"If the moment is right, I'll say 'do you want to come inside and see it?' I'll show them the main stage, then return them to 57th Street and they go on their merry way."

ENLARGE

Zina Saunders

No one could be better at such a show-and-tell than Mr. Francesconi, 59, the venerable hall's first and only archivist and director of its Rose Museum.

Hired in 1986 to gather memorabilia for Carnegie's 1991 centennial, he stayed on after the festivities, first as a solo act, then as head of a four-person department. And now the boyishly enthusiastic Mr. Francesconi has a new challenge: orchestrating the preservation and digitization of the 300,000 programs, fliers, ticket stubs, photographs, letters, albums, scrapbooks and recordings that have been amassed from 50,000 events in Carnegie's three concert spaces.

Mr. Francesconi had always hoped Carnegie would figure prominently in his career, but he'd been thinking more along the lines of conducting Respighi than conducting research. A San Francisco native, he came to New York in 1974 to further his musical studies and began working part time at the hall as an usher, a job that led to a 10-year stint as backstage attendant—seeing to the pre- and postperformance needs of
Ella Fitzgerald,
Helen Hayes,
Vladimir Horowitz,
Yo-Yo Ma and
Frank Sinatra,
among others. In the process, said Mr. Francesconi, "I made the history of the hall my hobby."

Heady stuff, meeting and greeting the great and near-great, but, in 1984, his ambitions on hold long enough, Mr. Francesconi went to Italy to study conducting with
Franco Ferrara,
a tutorial cut short by the maestro's death. A replacement mentor would be available in a year, but meanwhile Mr. Francesconi needed a job. Back it was to Carnegie, where plans were afoot for the 100th anniversary, a celebration that would include an exhibit on the hall's history. But who would take charge of it? More to the point, what was going to be on display? At the time, the Carnegie historical record was minimal—a few volumes of programs, at best.

"Judith had an uncanny talent for spotting unique talent in others," Mr. Francesconi said, referring to
Judith Arron,
the hall's late general manager and artistic director. "She must have seen something in me. We agreed that I would see them through the centennial."

While he had no training as an archivist, a situation later remedied with courses at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. "Judith said it would be easier to teach me about gray boxes and acid-free folders than it would be to teach a real archivist the 96-year history of this place."

Mr. Francesconi was a quick study. When he learned, for example, that the magazine Modern Maturity (now AARP the Magazine) reached 27 million people—and, by the way, his target demographic, the over-50 crowd who might have some choice old Carnegie souvenirs—he called to see about placing an ad.

"The editor and I started talking," Mr. Francesconi recalled, "and he said, 'You mean Carnegie Hall doesn't have an archive?'" Because for decades the hall had been a rental facility and in more recent years the focus had been on saving and restoring it rather than memorializing it, no, Carnegie didn't have an archive. "And the editor said 'this isn't an ad; it's a story.'"

Ah, the power of the press. "Overnight," Mr. Francesconi said, "I started getting posters, photographs, programs." All told, some 15,000 pieces. He also started getting the handwritten memories of countless couples who met at a Carnegie concert, of the man who, as a 10-year-old, was sitting in the hall's balcony on Dec. 7, 1941, when
Arthur Rubinstein
was playing
Brahms
and the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor.

A while later,
Benny Goodman's
daughters donated Dad's clarinet. It occupies a place of honor in the 1,200-square-foot Rose Museum on the hall's second floor, not far from Fitzgerald's spectacles, the trowel used to lay Carnegie's cornerstone and—most precious—a ticket from the opening-night concert, May 5, 1891.

"I was on a quest to get that for 20 years. I finally found it," said Mr. Francesconi, who's hoping similar determination will produce the original drawings and renderings by Carnegie's architect,
William Burnet Tuthill.
"You hear those stories about someone going up in an attic or opening a door that hasn't been opened in years—and bingo."

He checks
eBay
twice a day, knowing that you can't always get what you want. Carnegie was outbid on a limited-edition series of jazz recordings signed by impresario Norman Granz and outbid twice on a flier heralding a lecture on spiritualism by
Arthur Conan Doyle.
"He could have sold out more nights than Liza," observed Mr. Francesconi, who, at some point bowed to the fact that while making music was well and good, his future lay in Carnegie's past.

"Every year I would say, 'I'm going back to Italy to conduct.' But I kept postponing it. I was having too much fun," he said. "My grandmother finally said: 'You're not coming back. You're doing what you're born to do.' Sometimes you don't realize it until it's staring you in the face.

"At one point I said to my conducting teacher: 'I don't know what to do. If I stay in Italy there's a chance that my career will take off. But if I don't do that archiving job, I don't think anyone else will do it.'

"And he said: 'Let me ask you something. How many conductors have there been at Carnegie?'" Four thousand, maybe five, Mr. Francesconi guessed.

"And how many historians have there been?" the teacher persisted.

"I said 'none,' and my teacher said, 'Well, think about that.'"

A chunk of a girder stamped "Carnegie" sits in Mr. Francesconi's office near a photo inscribed "To Gino, Best Wishes, Benny Goodman." It's a quick elevator ride down to the
Isaac Stern
auditorium, where Mr. Francesconi led a visitor to one of his favorite perches, the second-tier stage right, box number four. "From here you can experience the stage and the audience. You get the whole package," he said. "A week doesn't go by without people calling our office and saying they were on the stage. They were part of a student recital or a student concert or their graduation was here. It all adds to the patina of the place."

Collectibles are still showing up. In a recent batch of mail were two programs from the 1940s and the 1960s. "And I needed both of them," said Mr. Francesconi, who has his own plans for adding to the historical record.

For years, during his term as the backstage attendant, he asked performers to sign a poster-size photo of the hall. "And someday," Mr. Francesconi said, "I'm going to donate it to Carnegie. That will be my gift, a memento of a wonderful time."

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